


Tradition

by phantisma



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-23
Updated: 2006-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:23:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantisma/pseuds/phantisma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s Christmas, 2020.  Buffy and Spike share a tradition of their own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tradition

She felt old.

Slayers were never meant to live so long.

But then, maybe dying twice and escaping death twenty or thirty times had bought her old age. Maybe changing the rules was enough to change her destiny.

She was a legend now. A legend at 37…and that doesn’t seem as old as she feels.

The years have piled up on her, coming to rest in a body that’s been beat up, buried, burned, bitten, bruised…and on nights like this she feels it all.

It’s been years since she’d been out on patrol. Years since she’d taken Slayers out on their first patrol. She faded slowly into the dark, and went away, leaving the night to the younger ones. Leaving the fight to those with fewer years in them, fewer scars, less pain.

It was all kind of sad, really. Dawn was married, had kids. Xander too. Giles was gone. Faith was…wherever Faith went. No one seemed to know really. Just one day, she was gone.

Buffy pulled the warm wool blanket around her tighter. The fire didn’t seem to warm the old place like it used to. Outside the snow was falling, like it had been since she’d gotten there. Like it did every year when she came. It had started as a place to get away from the clamor off fifty slayers and the responsibility of being Buffy, Vampire Slayer Mom.

Now, it was something more. It was a tradition. She started Christmas week with Willow, and they visited Xander and his family together, talked about the old times, caught up on things, and then she left them and went to see Dawn and her three daughters. Buffy stayed until Christmas morning, then she was gone…she came here, alone.

It wouldn’t stay that way, but from the time she got there until midnight, she savored the solitude. She drank cocoa laced with amaretto, the way her mother used to make it. She built a fire and watched it burn. She mourned all the Christmases that had gone and the people who once occupied them.

It would never be the same.

Round about eleven she would let herself cry…it was almost like the grief waited, built…all year long she was fine…and now, it had to be released…There were pictures, laid out on the coffee table…Her mother, Giles, Angel…slayers called and killed before they were even adults…classmates whose names she scarcely remembered…

People that even the legend couldn’t save. All the whispers and knowing looks, all the pleading…Buffy, the Vampire Slayer…the one and only…until she wasn’t anymore.

Cried out, she sat back on the couch, the old, worn couch that had held her every Christmas as she cried for close to 15 years now. The clock chimed out the hour, and she looked up expectantly. Twelve o’clock…Christmas was over, and just as always he appeared, vague smile on his face, sparkle in his eyes, looking no older than he had when they had first met, though she had aged considerably. “Everything okay, pet?”

She smiled, through the lingering tears wetting her cheeks and nodded. “Everything is okay, Spike.”

He held up the bottle and she nodded. Spike always came and he always brought whiskey, and they would drink. Toasts for the ending of another year, the coming of another…for friends and loved ones…for traditions. They drank the bottle dry. They drank and didn’t talk.

There was kissing, generally somewhere near the middle of the bottle, when the whiskey had warmed his skin. There was touching and petting and muffled sounds that might have been words before they got lost in the heat.

She still wasn’t in love with him, not like he was with her…that had always belonged to Angel…but when he touched her, when his tongue slid inside her and made her body sing, when he gave her exactly what she needed, she couldn’t help but love him. She couldn’t tell him, but she suspected he knew.

He held her, in the wee hours of the morning, as the fire died slowly and he made her feel not so old, not so alone. She would sleep then, wrapped up in his arms, in the warm of blanket and fire and whiskey and this tradition…this shared time when the years didn’t matter and the world outside went away and there was only this, Spike, Buffy and tradition.


End file.
